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Want updates about the latest E.E. Knight releases? I send out broadcast emails through the social networking forum Knightreaders. I hate spam as much as the next guy, so I don't plan on doing much broadcast emailing.

There is also an E.E. Knight fan site on Facebook.

The always-entertaining nick_kaufmann is exposing a new writer's scam here with an appalling follow-up here.

Perhaps there is more money to be made in bilking starry-eyed amateurs than in publishing interesting stories. But that doesn't mean the practice shouldn't be fought.

I received some gentle criticism for my first round of manuscript reviews at the OCWW. I was told that some thought my commentary overly harsh, and that I should do more to accentuate the positive I saw in the manuscript.

That's no way to get better, but okay.

For the record, I opened with positive commentary on the piece, and closed with positive commentary, and as I read I noted lines I really liked. I also praised the writer's courage for even submitting in the first place. Okay, eighty percent or more of the commentary was stuff that I thought needed changing or tweaking, but that's the nature of a critique. I certainly wasn't cutting or sarcastic. I don't even say whether I think it's publishable or not. I've never been in the business of cutting checks to writers and my professional experience is limited to sf/horror/fantasy.

I'd never tell anyone to give it up. Where someone is as a writer today might be just a baseline for improvements over the years. While naturally gifted writers exist, just as gifted musicians and gifted woodworkers and gifted gardeners exist, like all those other skills you can learn how to do it better in a bunch of different ways and create talent where none was evident and then hone that talent further. I'm the result of about thirty years of haphazard effort, irregular learning, trial, and error that can only be neatly expressed with exponents.

Nobody at the pro level puts much time into positive reinforcement. If I'm really lucky, when talking over a manuscript or reading editorial notes I'll get a "ha!" or two, or in rare instances "that's vintage E.E. Knight right there" but that's it. You take knocks in this business over your work. Most of us care deeply about it. I know that hurt. I don't just know it, I've slept with it. We've had weekends away together. When my ego deflates like a cheap tire, I can usually pump it back up in a day or two. The next contract is all the praise I ask for (though I happily accept it in any form, 24/7).

I know it can feel like a beatdown. I've been through several myself as an amateur. You'll learn, both from what the pro says and your own emotional progress in separating Self from Work. So if you get a chance to be critiqued by a pro, do it. Take a piece of leather to bite down on if you have to, but do it.

I'll be at Windycon (yes, in costume, at least on Saturday) in Lombard IL Nov 13-15 in all my Steampunk glory. Actually, my costume might be characterized as a Steampunk/Dieselpunk straddle, but that's carbonized bamboo filament-splitting. I think Sunday I'm doing Richard's traditional Windycon Writer's Workshop.

Speaking of Writing Workshops, in November I'll also be lecturing at our venerable Off Campus Writer's Workshop (Nov 5, 12, and 19). My contract says they can video record me, so it's possible that the lecture portions will be available at some point.

It looks like I'm not up on their website yet. The course will be a mixture of my "Writing the Genre Novel" presentation and critique sessions.

Green eyeshade time.

With the latest batch of royalty statements in, it looks like my writing income ratios out at:




The physical, bound books produced by Penguin: 70%
Foreign Language Rights: 25%
Audio: 3-4%
Ebooks 1-2%

Roughly.

I'm new to audio (the Age of Fire books just started to come out this month and less than a year old with the first VE titles) and not much of a name, so I can understand audio lagging. Looks like I'll have my modest advances paid off on the audio VE books sometime in Q2 or Q3 next year, if trends stay the same.

Why are ebooks so low? Per copy, I make very good money off them. It's just that they don't sell.

I think the medium is still sorting itself out, for one. For another, there are the stolen/cracked versions floating around. It's always entertaining to see how quickly files of my latest release appears on the BitTorrent sites and whatnot. I think I'll have to buy a decent stopwatch for next summer's title to get an accurate measure. But then again, most people won't steal no matter how easy the theft, so it must be something else.

Could it be pricing? People are used to paying less for electronic-only content.

DISCLAIMER: I have no control over the pricing of my ebooks. I've gone to publisher and agent and said I'd be perfectly happy to sell Way of the Wolf and Dragon Champion for next to nothing, or even give them away free under one of the creative commons licenses floating around out there, but no joy. I get some iteration of "the ebook vendors set the price."

Winter Duty is $9.99 as an ebook at Barnes and Noble and Amazon's Kindle, Way of the Wolf $6.39 on Kindle and $7.99 for B&N electronic. I think ebooks should be a cheaper than that, since the production costs are minimal (assuming you have the physical picking up the tab on editorial and cover art and marketing and whatnot). You could probably discount them quite a bit and still have author, publisher, and vendor make about the same profit per copy as a physical book.

Even were I making nothing on my ebooks, I'd just hope that ebook reader Early Q. Adopter tries Dragon Champion, likes it, and buys a physical copy for his niece who's into dragons, because in 2009, for me (I should really underline the "for me" part but it looks cheezy and high-school noteish), that's where the bread and butter is. There's still a huge advantage to taking up some shelf real estate with your books. And to me, there's something that suggests permanence to bound volumes. With a business as chancy as this, anything that conveys permanence invites you to cling to it like a shipwreck survivor with a wooden deck chair.

Winter Duty is on-shelf today. My folks are still in Oak Park, so I'm not doing too much running around to bookstores today (that'll be later this week). I do have an event at the Oak Brook Borders tonight at 7PM. I imagine it will be sparsely attended, so if anyone wants to show up to round out the crowd. . .

Looking back on these last five years and some ten months, I feel very fortunate. Thirteen novels. Six foreign languages. Audio. Even if I didn't have all that, I'd still count myself successful in that I'm still being published.

Of course it wasn't just me. Paul Witcover, my old editor at the defunct iPublish imprint, introduced me to a great agent. Fred Saberhagen, may he rest in peace, read me and offered a blurb. Some online webmags decided to feature me with interviews and whatnot. Other published authors lent me advice and emotional support on the pay-it-forward ethic that runs so strong among skiffy writers. I had editors who gave me a good start and a publisher that supported me with some successful marketing efforts. Award committees gave me their blessing -- along with a little plaque. I made the transition to hardcover with the VE series. While I still haven't rung any sales bells that have them popping corks at Penguin, most of them that ship get sold.

But there's something else. Otherwise they could do it for everybody. I think a writing career launch is a little like a cutting-out expedition from one of the fighting sail Hornblower books. The prowling frigate is looking to take the fat merchantman out from under the shore batteries, but it has to wait for just the right combination of wind, moon, and tide. Maybe it was a sharp cover look, or just long-enough lull in new post-apocalyptic fiction, or a title that hit the ear as a fresh melody against the rest of the stuff that was out in the fall of 2003. Anyway, I won an audience. Not big, but they are devoted. Roc can count on a certain number of sales when a new E.E. Knight title hits, and that ensures future work for me (and diapers for the Sprog). But a writing career is built on shifting sands, much like the tidal bars that merchantman hides behind. A career can wash away as easily -- or as laboriously -- as it's formed.

Though when you come right down to it, a tomorrow isn't promised to any of us.

All the more reason to enjoy today. So I'm looking forward to visiting my local store--hopefully at 10AM on the dot as they unlock the doors. Perhaps not as heart-poundingly breathless as when I first saw Way of the Wolf on the shelves, but it's still a floating-on-air sensation to see all that work bound up behind a dust jacket.

God I love this trade.

Ever had one of those odd dreams that leave you more exhausted than if you hadn't slept? The dream wasn't anything strange, just me as a kid biking around Stillwater dodging some traffic, but it left me dozy and muddle-minded.

Anway, jimvanpelt did a nice list of tips for writing dialog this morning.

http://jimvanpelt.livejournal.com/196062.html?view=1224926#t1224926

An awful lot of good storytelling is theft. My favorite novel, Watership Down, is really a retelling of Virgil’s Aeneid with rabbits.

It’s really nothing to be ashamed of. Theft should be embraced and celebrated, as long as it’s done properly. Doing it properly simply involves stripping away all the trappings and frills until the story structure is laid bare, like the framework of a house beneath the siding and Tyvek and glass.

Borrowing architectural style from a story you like is only plagiarism if you’re copying characters, lines of dialogue, exact settings and so on. It’s the difference between duplication and inspiration. Duplication would be like building an imitation of Wright’s Falling Waters over some other watercourse. About the only creditable action is your instinct for choosing what to copy. But the reason Falling Waters appeals probably isn’t the exact layout of the balconies and roof; I’d suggest it has something more to do with the way the structure is integrated into the landscape (Wright liked to make his homes look like they’d grown out of the local elements naturally), or the pleasant airiness of the cantilevering, or the proportion of window to wall.

That’s the trick, analyzing something you like and figuring out why it appeals. Chances are if you go deep enough, you’ll figure out why it makes your throat tighten and be able to adapt it to your own story.

There’s a scene in Gone With the Wind I’ve always wanted to do. It’s the one where Scarlett shoots the Yankee scavenger rooting through what’s left of Tara. It’s not the shooting itself so much, though it’s well done and I knew Scarlett had it in her to pull a trigger in a man’s face, it’s Melanie Wilkes tottering out of her sickbed dragging her dead brother’s sword that she can’t even lift to come to the aid of her sister-in-law. I don’t know what she thought she was going to do. The only practical aid she could offer Scarlett is to collapse on top on the cur, but it’s no less courageous for its futility. Maybe it’s even more courageous because of it.

That scene isn’t about the costumes or poor stripped Tara or the pistol or the earrings or the dead man’s sword. Clear all that away and you have a mismatched pair of people, one a burden of honor and convention to the other, forced to join together for the first time because of an intruding threat. One’s capable, the other’s not, one’s effective, the other’s not, but they come out of the experience with more respect for each other (though Melanie still irritates Scarlett when she comes over shy about removing her shift to soak up the blood), and, perhaps unwillingly, closer allies than ever. That’s a heck of a cool turn of events whether your story is set in Egypt of the Pharaohs or some crumbling space-station.

So if, in some tumbledown corner of the Dragon Empire, you ever see an exsanguinated AuRon painfully dragging himself to the aid of the Copper (or vice versa) as the ring of speartips close, well … you’ll know who I stole it from.

I think ebooks still have a way to go. Taking a look at the total sold in various formats for Dragon Outcast in its first year of publication, my latest royalty statement shows 84 units purchased. It's a very small percentage of trade paper units (though there's no reserve against returns with ebooks, I guess, so that's nice).

I wonder if Penguin made enough to cover the various technical costs. Doubt it.

I'm sure many ebooks do much better than that. Ebooks are a great way to keep current if you're in software development, ferinstance. Even I was buying them back in my code-slinging days, and there wasn't anything like the formats and readers out there now. As I recall I was stuck with some goofy protected pdf. But as a driving engine of the swaybacked old S.S. E.E. Knight, they're not much more than a trolling motor.

Had a call from Ginjer yesterday. I really need an agent/editor-only "red phone" because it came when I was talking weather with my parents and I almost didn't answer. It appears Penguin is going all-digital and she wanted to make sure I would be able to deal with a Winter Duty ms that was copyedited via the commenting function in MS Word.

I'm fine with that. If anything it'll speed things up.

I think the only drawback is that I won't have marked-up foul matter to give to the NIU archive anymore, though I think you can print in a manner that shows changes.

Of course I asked her about Dragon Strike since we rarely chat on the phone. (I've never had an editor who didn't accept email chit-chat, the latest joke, or family doings but there are no Algonquin Roundtable discussions of books and ideas; editors are busy people.) Latest release is doing fine for someone who isn't named Tolkien, Maguire or Niffenegger, and Dragon Champion crept back onto the bottom of the trade list which is always a good sign.

Hope this isn't too much inside baseball for y'all but it's what's on my mind this morning, other than Chats and snow and where I can park the car.

Welcome to daylight savings time, those of you who practice it.




Two cool things from France, cover art for Way of the Wolf and a neat book trailer for Dragon Champion.

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Back when I was shooting weddings, I used to tell my nervous brides than in years of photographing weddings, I'd never seen one where everything went right. Errors happen, unforeseen circumstances trip you up, all you can do is hope it's not major and enjoy your day. Chats and I almost got sunstroke having our pictures taken on the beach in formalwear, then we were inside cooling ourselves and admiring our beautiful wedding cake one of Florida's numerous "Palmetto bugs" (i.e. a cockroach) went dashing across the white linen tablecloth on the cake table. After that I kept expecting our uninvited guest to show up on someone's spoon. If only we'd had a Marx Brothers-style society dame attending -- turned out that the cockroach saw no opportunity for a humorous appearance and left us alone.

But I digress. It's like the NASA astronauts -- every mission they expected a glitch that would get heartbeats elevated for a while.

Book launches aren't like NASA missions (the worst thing that can happen is your career dies, and luckily you aren't your writing career), but stuff still goes wrong. There's been some buzzing on the internet this fall of different levels of buys at Borders and Barnes and Noble for various titles by praiseworthy authors.

I feel for the authors. I'll give you my own glitch story.

When Roc released Way of the Wolf in September of 2003 I eagerly went to look for my very first novel at my very own Oak Park Borders on the release day. Imagine my horror when I found out not only had didn't they have it on their shelves, they hadn't ordered any and the (possibly confused) associate who was helping me said there weren't any in the warehouse for me to order, either. I couldn't buy my own book. And I was definitely trying harder to get it that some regular Jane reader.

I made a few hurried calls to friends across country. Same story. No copies at Borders.

So I called acquiring editor (you see her here as suricattus now and then, though she's since gone on to Other Endeavors) and agent in, if not a losing-my-shit-panic, at least a state of extraordinarily deep concern or alarm. They both calmed me down (the publishing biz is really just one big Encounter Group at times) by assuring me that Borders had done a buy, just a very, very small one, and Barnes and Noble turned in a pretty good order which helped make up for the Borders sales belly-flop.

There's all sorts of things that can hamstring a book launch. Think of the titles that came out in September 2001. There's bad and even verging-on-ridiculous cover art (also happened to me) confusing titles, coincidental similarities to a similar title that died ugly, ornery reviewers, and the "venom cock" incident (I thought Touched by Venom was a very good book, btw, just that it truly is seriously dark fantasy about an unrelentingly nasty society, not the gothy vampires spanking each other stuff that sometimes passes for dark fantasy). Or Anne McCaffrey's Get of the Unicorn being accidentally retitled Get Off the Unicorn (Anne went with off, deciding it sounded neat). Shit happens.

I slogged on, doing what I could in my own way to market a book that was difficult to find at half the big chain stores (Borders controlled Waldenbooks, too). In the end it turned out all right, for me at least. When Choice of the Cat came out, Borders bought it and put Way of the Wolf on the shelves too.

Lately I've been more and more like those NASA guys. When the inevitable glitch to any of my releases hits, I just chuckle and move on. You just have to keep swinging for the bleachers, even if you strike out sometimes. If you dwell too much on the inevitable bad breaks, you forget just how lucky you are in other ways.

Geeze, I've only been doing this for five years and one month, and I seem to think I've earned the right to go all Polonius on your butts. Too much celebrating last night. . .

Roo the elderly cat went into business selling cat farts this morning and settled down next to my head so I could properly sample his wares. Yeesh. At least I know what a couple of dead polecats in a pile of rotten cabbage would smell like, for future writing reference.

I almost forgot that Strange Horizons did a little piece on me last week.

If you think I'm on some kind of PR blitz, I'm not. Kelle and I started talking about this interview in late 2006 or Spring of 2007 I believe. Just took forever to get around to doing it and placing it (all Kelle's effort, not mine, and I thank her). I also first queried Shaun at Adventures in SF Publishing many moons ago. It was just a example of the stars coming round right the same month.

There's something kind of charming about being dissed in a another tongue.

I thought the fire-breathing penguin comment was rather clever.

I made Chats an apple pie yesterday (her fave). There's something about fall and pies.

There's a podcast interview of me at the Adventures in Scifi Publishing site. I did it last week when I had my cold, so I had a bad case of medicine head. In fact, when we were originally supposed to do the interview Tuesday I was in bed. I heard the phone ring and reacted like Prahka Lasa in All of Me, mumbling brrrrring!, brrrrring! just listening to the phone trill, without any synapses connecting to remind me that the call was, in fact, the interview.

Rectified it Wednesday, but I was still kind of out of it. Shaun was cool, though.

Oh, the first review of Dragon Strike appeared, and it's by (natch!) Harriet. She's somehow picked up on this meme that Strike is the last Age of Fire book. I know when I first outlined the series, it was three little books and one fat ol' doorstop to conclude it with a bang, but the publisher had me break up the final book into multiple volumes. Anyway, somehow the "this is the last one" got into the air on the internet and it keeps being repeated.

I've signed a contract for books five and six and been paid an advance and everything. Cross my heart! I know the series doesn't sell like Paolini or even Novik but it's not a flop.

My first panel was “Creating Characters: Mundane or New Species”

There was some chafing about the definition of mundane. Most people took it to mean “ordinary humans” and that’s a great def. My own version of a “mundane” is anything we’ve seen a lot of: otherworldly elves, beardy dwarves, vampires, dragons, werebeasts allergic to silver, zombies who can only be taken out with a headshot. . . In other words, stuff that generally has an accepted fanlore built around it.

I defended the use of boilerplate fantasy in some circumstances. For example, there’s a built-in audience for reasonably familiar vampires. As long as what the vampires are doing and how they meet the bare necessities is fresh enough, chances are you’ll attract an audience.

The whole panel agreed that whatever you are creating, your characterization goal is the same: get the reader involved in how these people solve problems. Sherlock Holmes and Mike Hammer are going to bring in the bad guy using very different methodologies, but both make good reads for their respective audiences.

I talked a little about motivation, using my modified Mamet inventory: what does the character want (or think it wants), what is the character willing to do to meet those wants and needs, and why does it have to be now?

At the end I quoted Gene Wolf’s thumbnail guide to characterization: simply decide the one, two or three attributes of your character if boiled down to gravy, then just have them speak and act so those attributes are illustrated to the audience.


Then came “Writing with Vampires and Dragons” which seemed tailor-made for me.

The big point I made is that vampires and dragons are both very powerful beings. The audience won’t have much interest or fun if they win their battles easily thanks to those powers, so you have to figure out a way to make them underdogs.

With my dragons, I started them off as young and vulnerable. I gave each crippling defects (well, Wistala’s is more mental than physical). As the books progress, the dragons grow up and become more powerful, so I have to set them against other dragons or even more powerful entities.

With the Vampire Earth books it was easy. Since the vamps were the enemies, the tougher they seemed the better. I made the vamps nice and powerful to give my hero a formidable foe. Also, I put the Kurian Order on top, so to speak, so he not only has to fight the bloodsuckers, he has to overturn a whole social organization.

The next panel was on “Fan Fiction.”

I have very little expertise on this so I mostly listened. I talked about fan fiction from an author’s perspective a little: an author needs to actively defend his creations, otherwise it gets easier to muddy the legal waters. Though honestly, the first fiction I ever wrote was fanfic (though there wasn't a name for it back then). I think it’s great as “training wheels” in developing your skills as a writer, or to enjoy the experience of beloved characters living on, so to speak. I’m not inclined to actively dis something that gives pleasure to so many.

But if someone sends fanfic to me, I make a point of not reading it, and I don’t hunt it up on the internet.

The final panel was “Let’s Scare Them Half To Death.”

Basically, it turned into a discussion on the basics of horror writing. I did my usual spiel about everyone having their own “monsters of the Id” and an author should follow the “less is more” school of description for horror. I brought up H.G. Wells’s Martian war machines, how he mostly described them by what they were doing, rather than giving precise bolt-by-bolt descriptions. I recommended that you mostly describe monsters through verbs and simple metaphors.

A good monster is something of a striptease. First you see the effects of the monster’s action (Jaws and Them are both good examples of this), then maybe you hear them or see shadows or have the yellow barrels come knifing through the water toward Quint's boat or what have you, finally in the end there should be somewhat of a reveal as the hero finally confronts the worst-case scenario. I take more of a burlesque approach than a no-g-string lap-dance reveal, though I know there are audiences for both.

We talked a little bit about building suspense, where after establishing early on how the monster operates (Dolarhyde’s home invasions in Red Dragon, for example) you then insert someone the audience cares about into that grim clockwork – Tippie Hedren waiting outside the Bodega Bay schoolhouse containing Cathy Brenner as the crows gather in The Birds.

So, that’s what I had to say in brief. It’s almost like being there! Just put some old funky sweatsocks under your nose and play some loud filk from the other side of the room divider as you read this and you’ll have the full con experience!

ridayah asked about real life situations that make it into the books.

I do an occasional blend, mixing this and that from people I know. For example, a Lifeweaver might be a mashup of my old judo coach and a former professor.

Even if I meet someone who I can cut and paste directly out of real life and put in a book (I could do it easily with someone like Jim Pavelec. A big, dangerous motherfarker with a scary-long reach but very soft spoken and gentle. Seriously, the guy's like Spiderman. He's jumped out of his chair and chased down a shoplifter.), I'd hesitate, because I don't want to start guessing games about who is who from my life. Also, I don't want people walking around on tiptoe in deadly fear they'll end up in a book.

And yes, there's some me here and there. I remember sitting down to an award dinner at World Fantasy with a couple of Roc's editor gals and Susan, the executive editor in charge of Roc and Ace (remember, the editorial world is 90% female, so don't put "Dear Sir" in your query letters -- get a name). They all looked at me in some combination of polite social interest and clinical detachment. I remember feeling a little like Macbeth with these three women, all of whom knew more about my career and my future than I did, staring at me across this vast round table -- though the conversation involved no references to eyes of newts or dog tongues that I can recall. Just sell-through rates. I wasn't quite a surly as Valentine, but then I was at the banquet table voluntarily. I worked that odd sensation into the briefing scene of Valentine's Resolve.

Oh, and losing my virginity involved some hay and a slight name alteration from Val's first love (one has to express one's eternal gratitude somehow). No barn, though. Bet that's got you thinking.

So that's that. I do put in stuff from my life, but not that much. I'm way more likely to work in an interesting figure from reading history or biography.

Don't worry, centerfolds will be showing up shortly. :)

You probably all know we lost a literary talent to suicide over the weekend.

Anything I might have to say about David Foster Wallace would be faking it, so I won't even try. But in reading the tributes I came across something he wrote for Salon interview in 1996 and liked it enough that I want to keep it handy in the blog.

BTW, the interview is dated March 8, 1996. I'll have to check the journals, but it was right around that birthday (March 7) that I had my premature midlife crisis (30 was "wow, I'm 30." 31 was "what the hell am I doing here?") and decided I should get serious about writing a novel.

I'll cop to being a crass, cynical, and commercial writer, btw. Though I do take pride in my work and enjoy it and I'll swear on a stack of Tolkien that I don't have contempt for my readers.

Anyway, here's Wallace. I really like the pair of lines at the end of the third paragraph.

Personally, I think it's a really neat time. I've got friends who disagree. Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.

If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you're writing for other writers, so you don't worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you're communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way -- essentially television on the page -- that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.

What's weird is that I see these two sides fight with each other and really they both come out of the same thing, which is a contempt for the reader, an idea that literature's current marginalization is the reader's fault. The project that's worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it's also pleasurable to read. The reader feels like someone is talking to him rather than striking a number of poses.

Part of it has to do with living in an era when there's so much entertainment available, genuine entertainment, and figuring out how fiction is going to stake out its territory in that sort of era. You can try to confront what it is that makes fiction magical in a way that other kinds of art and entertainment aren't. And to figure out how fiction can engage a reader, much of whose sensibility has been formed by pop culture, without simply becoming more shit in the pop culture machine. It's unbelievably difficult and confusing and scary, but it's neat. There's so much mass commercial entertainment that's so good and so slick, this is something that I don't think any other generation has confronted. That's what it's like to be a writer now. I think it's the best time to be alive ever and it's probably the best time to be a writer. I'm not sure it's the easiest time.

Answering Wallace's question about what makes fiction magical to me in brief is tough. But I'll give it a shot. Unlike movies, TV, even graphic novels to an extent, with fiction you can really get inside someone's mind (something that's tough to do with a more visual medium) and you have time to paint and shade the emotional changes and thought processes that, were say a TV script to try to do so, would usually come off as obvious and forced. When reading, you sort of become that character.

Also, there's the matter of elbow room to fill in backstory and build history.

A great example is Scott Smith's A Simple Plan. Hank Mitchell is exactly the kind of guy I would want to come driving up if I'm broken down beside the road. He'd help out until I'm safely on my way again; Smith makes me 100% certain of that fact. Yet, over the course of the novel, Hank becomes what amounts to a serial killer, in a completely convincing manner by showing what Hank sees as being at stake.

You know what? At the end of the novel, even after killing, what, five people, I'd still want Hank to drive up if I'm broken down roadside. That's some trick.

I haven't done a craft post in a while.

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I decided to take up the challenge issued by newguydave and talk about a favorite hero.

I was having some trouble making up my mind, but in the end decided to talk about Keith Laumer’s Retief, not because he’s necessarily the best, but because he’s the least well-known of that list. I always feel like I'm doing a bit of good in the world when someone else discovers a new favorite.

So here goes.

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